Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

“This is not the way we came,” he called out to his guide.

The Red Man shook his head slightly. “Another route…” his words came, faintly over his shoulder.

“That’s wise. We will avoid the Troglodytes this time, I suppose?” But no answer came. He rode alongside of Laura, and spoke to her, but she had little to say. Her manner was as passive as ever. Indeed, she seemed so blank and docile that Vergil felt a pang of doubt concerning his feelings for her. Could she really be little more than a lovely doll? Had Cornelia’s state and beauty sapped and stunted her personality? Or was this merely a sort of protective shock?

Presently she was enough aroused to answer one or two of his questions — or, rather, to explain why it was she could not answer them. “I do not know why they took me from the Great High Road,” she said softly. “They said that Queen — that my mother had sent them, and they showed me a letter from her.”

“A forgery, doubtless. But it is very strange… to have brought you so far, when convenient hiding places were so much nearer. One wonders why, for what motive. Ransom?” But Laura did not know. She gazed out of her mild and lovely wine-dark eyes on the passing desert. From time to time Vergil suggested a halt, but the Red Man pressed on. Sometimes he shook his head, sometimes he gestured ahead with his driving stick; he never spoke. They had grown so gradually weary that it took some time for Vergil and Laura to realize that their present route had taken them quite definitely out of and away from the Sea of Sand. They were now, and had been for some time, in a region of stones, the land rising gradually on all sides.

They were discussing this, in weary wonder, when he observed that she had closed her eyes and pressed her hand to her temple. He drew his camel in close to hers and reached out to support her. “We must stop now,” he called out. “The princess is very faint.”

Without turning his head, the Red Man said, “We are almost there.”

“Almost there?” Vergil felt anger rising over fatigue. “Almost where? I tell you, we must stop at once!” But Ebbed-Saphir spoke only to the mounts, and they would not pause now for all of Vergil’s urgings. It was a slight shift in the wind which brought tidings of what their eyes soon enough beheld. A perfume, a fragrance, as of some garden in Cyprus… he thought, at first, he dreamed… Then he saw it.

But it was no garden. Up, up past a wilderness of polished stones glittering in the fading sun like giant gems the trail had led them, finally diemboguing into a high plateau. And there was a great pile, as large as a house, of logs: scented cedarwood and fragrant sandalwood and trees of myrrh and other odorous timbers of balsam and the like. Intricately carved and carpeted steps led to the summit and there was a pavilion somewhat furnished.

A clap of thunder, a blaze of light sounded and shone in Vergil’s head. Fragments whirled and danced and, suddenly, like pieces of a mosaic, came together in a visible pattern. “Man of fire! Man of Tyre!” a voice shouted as the Red Man dismounted and advanced. “Phoenician? No, not Phoenician alone, but…”

“Phoenix!” said the Red Man. His face blazed with fiery light.

Not just a Phoenician, but a Phoenix! Not, indeed, the symbolic, metaphorical bird of legend, but the actual being itself. Gone now was all semblance of fatigue; all was joyful haste, as of a man going to a long-awaited tryst. The words poured forth from him. He, too, was old — if not as old as the Cyclops — but he was mortal, and his mortality indescribably wearied him. Up and down the world and to and fro, he had been coming and going for centuries: and now his time was at hand, had been at hand for these two years past. Only the fire could liberate him from the fretting, chafing shackles of his flesh, and, by its destruction of his present body, enable him to renew his youth.

The sign of regeneration, Vergil thought. Eagle, serpent, phoenix.

Aloud, he said, “If such is your need, Captain Phoenix, then it is not for me to stand in your way.”

But the other looked at him, teeth and eyes gleaming in his blazing face. “You? You are nothing but a path on which I tread. The Phoenix has no need of wizards.”

“Then do what you must. Why you have brought me here, I do not at all know. Is it to kindle your pyre? The task likes me not, but — ”

An-Thon Ebbed-Saphir laughed his brief scorn. “I have little time to enjoy the irony of it, but I have brought you here to pull, as it were, my chestnuts from the fire. I know the Cyclops hates me. I was not certain that you would succeed in rescuing my bride from him — ”

“Your Bride?”

The Red One nodded. “Yes… You spoke of my need. Little do you know of it, that you ask in such astonishment. Yes, the Phoenix must have a bride! And, as the Phoenix is always male, he must take his bride from among the daughters of ordinary men. Our marriage, my marriage, the marriage of the Phoenix, is not an act of venery — though in such sweatings and writhings we usually join as gladly as the rest of you. No — only the union of male and female in the fire’s dissolution can result in the formation of the magical egg from which the new Phoenix will emerge. My bride!” — he turned to Laura, extending his hand — “my bride!”

With a gasp and a quivering breath, she drew back within the shelter of Vergil’s arm and cloak.

“You need not fear. The pain is brief and slight, the joy is exceeding great, and in these our wedding resembles weddings of mortality and flesh. Neither fear me nor disdain me, but come surmount with me our matrimonial pavilion on the pyre… You still fear? Believe me that you need not! I will be patient a moment more, but I have not forever.”

Vergil said, as the setting sun cast its red reflection on the other’s face, “But why, Phoenix, out of all the world of women, have you selected this one woman? You see she does not wish it, nor should you wonder. But surely in all the world there must be at least one who would?”

“There is. She was. Long ago, as this girl measures time, the other pledged her troth to this mystic wedding in return for long life, for love, and for the potency to gain a throne. She gained that throne, she shared that love, she was to live as long as her Phoenix lived… perhaps five hundred years… perhaps more… one can never be sure. But when the time to be translated and transformed came to her Phoenix, earlier than expected, this traitor woman shrank in terror. She refused to join me.”

Pale blue-green and cold were his eyes, but red, red his fiery face and skin. Vergil heard Cornelia’s voice, so low. My heart belongs to someone whom I dare not see. He did not wonder. He would not have wondered if the sight of her lover alone caused her to burst into flame upon the instant.

“Oh” — the other’s face twisted, his head went slant, in admiring love and almost hatred — “she is cunning, in this one way she’s strong! She was able to erect barriers against me for herself… but only for herself. So — ”

“What a man vows for himself, as all the world knows, can be fulfilled in his son; a woman, in her daughter. And thus it is now that I claim my promised bride. If it’s not to be Cornelia, Queen of Carsus, then let it be her daughter, Princess Laura. Let it be, I say. Come, my bride. Come, my bride.”

He finished speaking, once more he extended his hand, once more Laura stepped back — this time too rapidly for Vergil to continue his protective vigil. And instantly the finger of the Phoenix moved, and two circles of fire sprang up, one around Vergil and the other around Laura. And when Vergil moved, his own circle flamed high and higher, imprisoning him.